Ken Landwehr, Who Played Key Role in Capture of Serial Killer, Dies at 59

Lt. Ken Landwehr, a homicide detective in Wichita, Kan., who played a pivotal role in the capture of the serial killer known as B.T.K., whose terrorizing spree went unredressed for more than 30 years, died at his home on Monday in Wichita. He was 59.

The cause was kidney cancer, said Joel Vanatta, who is married to the lieutenant’s stepdaughter.

Lieutenant Landwehr, whom the city’s mayor, Carl Brewer, called “the Dick Tracy of Wichita,” served on the Wichita police force for more than 30 years. He was commander of the department’s homicide unit from 1992 until his retirement in 2012, by which time he had had a hand in more than 600 murder investigations, the department said.

They included a pair of unrelated quadruple murders that occurred within eight days in 2000, and the rape and murder of a 9-year-old girl in 1990.

But by far his most prominent case was that of Dennis Rader, who killed 10 people from 1974 to 1991 and who, in communications with the news media and the police, called himself B.T.K., an abbreviation of his working method: bind, torture, kill.

An egotist who enjoyed playing cat-and-mouse with the police, Mr. Rader bragged of his crimes and taunted the police with letters, poems and packages delivered to local news agencies and left in public places.

After his final murder — he strangled Dolores Davis, 62, in her Wichita home in 1991 — he vanished. But he resumed sending messages to newspapers and television stations in 2004.

He was finally caught in 2005. Lieutenant Landwehr and Mr. Rader had been exchanging coded messages placed in newspaper ads when the detective tricked him into using a floppy disk for his next communication, falsely telling him that the disk could not be used to track him down.

A few weeks later, Mr. Rader sent such a disk to a local television station. It was quickly traced to a computer at the church where Mr. Rader was a congregation leader. He was arrested days later, confessed to his crimes and was sentenced to 10 consecutive life terms, which he is serving at El Dorado Correctional Facility in El Dorado, Kan.

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Lieutenant Landwehr's most prominent case was that of Dennis Rader, who called himself B.T.K.CreditPool photo by Travis Heying

Born Jan. 23, 1954, Kenneth Landwehr grew up in Wichita, where local news reports said he was an Eagle Scout, a high school debate champion and a devotee of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales, but also a drinker and an occasional brawler as a teenager. His father, Lee, worked at Cessna, the aircraft company; his mother, Irene, was a homemaker.

By his own admission he was a poor student at Wichita State University, though he excelled in algebra and criminal justice and considered applying to join the F.B.I. He decided to pursue a career in law enforcement in 1977, after the store where he was working as a clerk was robbed.

He and others in the store were tied up, and one robber stood over him, loading a pistol. No one was killed, but the episode gave Lieutenant Landwehr the experience of being a victim and fostered a compassion for crime victims and their families that he said became his prime motivation in doing his job.

Indeed, he was known among friends and colleagues for taking cases personally.

“When I did my interview to get on the Police Department, they always ask you one question, ‘How far do you want to go in the department?’, and at that interview, I said I want to command homicide,” Lieutenant Landwehr said in a television interview. “Those victims cannot speak for themselves, so that’s probably the only reason why I picked homicide.”

His survivors include his wife, the former Cindy Gibson; their son, James; a stepdaughter, Holly Vanatta; a brother, David, and two step-grandchildren.

Lieutenant Landwehr was not yet 20 when Mr. Rader’s first victims — a family of four named Otero — were killed. He became involved in the B.T.K. case in the mid-1980s, when Wichita’s police chief formed a task force, known locally as Ghostbusters, to investigate the killings.

It was Lieutenant Landwehr, news reports said, who originated the strategy of playing on the killer’s demonstrated narcissism, prodding B.T.K. in public statements about the case to communicate ever more frequently with the police. It was he who made sure that the small amount of DNA evidence gathered at the Otero crime scene was saved until it was sure to be useful. And after the disk and other evidence pointed to Mr. Rader, it was he who arranged to test the DNA of a relative of Mr. Rader’s to compare with the Otero sample.

Upon Mr. Rader’s arrest, Lieutenant Landwehr took charge of his interrogation.

“I look right at him, he looks at me,” he recalled of their first meeting. “His first words are, ‘Hello, Mr. Landwehr.’ ”

Mr. Rader was especially annoyed that Lieutenant Landwehr had misled him about the police’s ability to trace a floppy disk.

“How come you lied to me?” he asked, to which Lieutenant Landwehr replied, “Because I was trying to catch you.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Ken Landwehr, Who Played Key Role in Capture of Serial Killer, Dies at 59. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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